One of my favorite ways to equip families for at-home discipleship is to lean into both the Church Year and calendar year. One great opportunity for take-home learning occurs in Advent.
Why Advent?
Advent is a great time to initiate something like a take-home family devotional for a few reasons. First, it’s the beginning of the Church Year. What’s a better time than the beginning of a season to try and start new habits?
Second, Advent is a time of waiting. Even in the season where everyone is busy preparing for Christmas, it’s a great way to encourage families to focus on this season of preparation and waiting for the coming of Christ. And it can be used as an opportunity to build new routines and help families focus on Jesus.
As church workers and church leaders, we are always looking for easy-to-use resources to help us equip congregants and families to latch onto God’s story of salvation observed in the Church Year.
One of the ways CPH helps with this is by providing unique and extensive Advent materials every year, including resources for sermon prep, children’s messages, Bible studies, a children’s Christmas service, and more. This year’s theme is “Every Heart Prepare.” It focuses on the preparations we make for Christmas every year, particularly our decorations, and shows how they point back to Jesus and His everlasting love and sacrifice for us.
Each day’s devotional entry includes a Bible verse to ponder, a short, thoughtful devotion, and a prayer. Altogether, doing a day’s devotion should only take about five minutes. The devotions are simple enough that families with kids about five or six and older should be able to use them on a daily basis. I love how this simple tool can help parents devote focused time on the Scriptures while not demanding a lot more of the families during an already busy time. Even families with younger children can benefit from the consistency and pattern of doing daily devotions—even if the young kids cannot fully participate in every part.
Beyond at-home devotional time, you can incorporate different parts of the devotionals into other aspects of your church or school culture. This can vary ministry to ministry, but think about what other ways you can connect devotional content into your normal ministry rhythms. For example, if your school sends out a weekly newsletter or your church sends out a weekly email, you might add the weekly themes and Scripture verses from the preaching and worship series to keep the theme and its ideas at the forefront of your community members’ minds.
One reviewer shared,
We purchased a box of these and gave a copy to each family with littles in our parish. Highly recommended for resource to minister to your families!
Some ministries may also choose to encourage families in their Advent journey by using social media. This could consist of posting the Scripture focus every day, or posing a question that connects with the day’s devotion. For a lot of families, this could serve as a great reminder to use the devotions.
An additional way to connect families with the Advent series in a creative manner is to plan weekly service events in Advent! This could involve the whole congregation before or after midweek or weekend worship services. Each week, plan a small service outing or project that connects to the theme of “preparing every heart.”
Service events could include the following:
However your congregation or school chooses to observe Advent this year, remind them to make time to focus on the real reason we prepare for Christmas—the coming of our Savior, Jesus.
Bring your whole church and school community together in preparation for Jesus’ birth with the Every Heart Prepare Advent series.